An important thing is this mistake costs often big. Are you are committing the same mistake?

What is it?

Not optimizing local businesses for ‘near me’ searches.

Yes, my friend, you read it right. As a local search optimization expert, you should not ignore ‘near me’ searches.

If you do, you will leave a good chunk of traffic to your competitors. This is something you would never like to happen.

In today’s post, I’m going to discuss SEO for near me searches.

After reading this post, I’m sure, you will successfully be able to reach people who are searching for “near me’.

But before we dive in, let’s shed some light on the context.

What Are ‘Near Me’ Searches

‘Near Me’ searches are location-based search queries. They are often conducted with a view to get quick results nearby.

Suppose, you are hungry and want to search for a restaurant that is near to your present location. You might search for ‘restaurant near me.’

The results of your search queries are based on your present location.

These are desktop-based Google Maps results.

When I searched on my mobile phone with the same query (location data on), I got the following results.

So you can see that mobile search results show distance as well. And you must have noticed that mobile search results on Google Maps are not ranked according to the distance. Bikkgane Biryani is featured at the bottom of the Google Maps results, but it is only 350 meters away from my location.

The point here is,

Even if you are very close to a searcher’s location, it is not necessary that you will come on the top on Google Maps.

You need to optimize your business for ‘near me’ searches.

Why You Need to Optimize For ‘Near Me’

Today, businesses cannot ignore ‘near me’ searches as more and more people are searching for ‘keyword + near me.’

Here is the data about related topics and related queries for ‘near me’ searches.

You see that restaurant topics and beauty parlor queries are on the top. Google Trends will show you the data of 16 topics and queries.

Why is there a tremendous growth in ‘near me’ searches? What is the reason?

Over the years, people have become more exact, precise in how they search on Google. Now, they want results that serve their purposes of search aptly.

By searching with KW+near me, they become sure that the results will be relevant to their locations. It is kind of magical.

What’s more,

As the number of mobile searches is greater than desktop searches these days and mobile search for ‘KW+near me’ shows distances as well, search queries with near me is growing rapidly.

However, people have started to add location qualifiers with near me.

“We’re now seeing a shift toward dropping location qualifiers (like zip codes, neighborhoods, and “near me” phrasing) in local searches, because people know that the results will automatically be relevant to their location—thanks to their phone,” says Google.

Steps to Optimizing for Near Me (SEO for Near Me Searches)

Leaving a few tweaks, near me optimization is the same as local search optimization. So the best local SEO techniques with a few add-ons work great for ‘near me’ optimization.

According to Google, local search results are based on relevance, prominence, and distance. These factors are combined to deliver the best search results to match searchers’ queries.

Here are some best practices that will help you rank on the top for ‘near me’ search queries.

1- Get Your Business Mobile

As I mentioned earlier mobile searches are now more than desktop searches, you cannot leverage ‘near me’ optimization if you don’t optimize your business for mobile.

In fact, 50.03% of all web traffic in 2017 were from mobile.

Here is the percentage of the web page served to mobile phones:

This data from Statista confirms that trend of people using mobile phones will continue to grow.

How will mobile optimization help you get the top ranking for ‘near me’ keywords?

My friend, Google is going to be Mobile-first indexing. Additionally, the trend of voice search is catching up fast. And people often use their mobile phones to conudct voice search. This all implies that getting mobile will help you when you are optimizing for near me searches.

Conclusion:

‘Near me’ searches are something that you cannot ignore if you want to target local people.

I have found that optimizing business for mobile, updating Google My Business, keeping reviews and rating visible to Google, having consistent NPA, building citations on high-authority websites, and earning backlinks with geographic anchor ‘near me’, and on-page SEO improve ranking for near me based queries.

What about you? Do you have any other tip on SEO for near me searches? Do share it in the comment section. I’d love to know about it.

11 comments on this post

Really great efforts and I really got very constructive knowledge about Local SEO. This article is absolutely great and very effective or someone like me who is doing online trade but some principles are fairly new till date, this article was great, very informative, and accurate.

Great read . I’ve always felt that the Near Me Titles were a little spammy. Quick question about adding the near me terms to content and with Adwords? Do you think using ‘near you” is seen the same as “near me”.

I am glad to know that you found it interesting. I think if you can manage to add “Near me” instead of “Near You” will help more. Or, a better way to do this would be to use near me in URL if you can’t use it in Title. For example: https://www.yelp.com/nearme/restaurants

Thanks for sharing this amazing tips with us. I also believe that 2018 will be very competitive for the digital marketer and the voice search is very important to promote your local search, therefore, you should focus on these tips to improve your voice search:- 1. Aim for Featured Snippets. 2. 39% of voice search users are looking for business information; so it’s never been a more important time to optimize your local SEO. 3. Google has mentioned that it’s looking at including voice search data in Search Console, with the idea being that these searches will be separated from keyboard queries, much like desktop and mobile search data is currently separated so try to get inside the mind of searchers. Hope these will promote your voice search in SEO. 4. Voice search is almost exclusively used on mobile, and it goes without saying that your website should be mobile-optimized.

This is a great post. I check your blogs regularly but after reading this blog and I’m inspired. It is extremely helpful information; I read such information a lot, for my personal knowledge. I was looking for this particular info from very long time. Thank you and good luck.